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Suburbia, Before the Fall

Since the 1950s, suburbs have represented what adulthood is supposed to look like for Americans: a spacious house, enough green to raise a family and refuge from the bustle of a nearby metropolis. But that might be changing. Americans are shifting away from the suburbs, with single-family housing permits hitting a dramatic low of 620,000 in 2013, down from a record high of 1.7 million in 2005. And they’re moving back to cities in a historical reverse of decades-old trends: permits for buildings with more than five units, for instance, almost doubled from 18 percent in 2005 to 34 percent in 2013.

Part of that shift is a result of the collapse of the housing bubble and the financial crisis that followed, but one also wonders if it reflects a growing American distaste for the suburbs. As the late former New York City mayor Ed Koch once put it: “Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It’s sterile. It’s nothing. It’s wasting your life.” Just before the bubble burst in 2008, photographer Andrew Borowiec traveled to Ohio, the Midwestern heartland where national elections are determined and new fast food products are tested, to capture this one-time American ideal—and the prefabricated bluegrass lawns and “lifestyle centers” (strip malls) it had become. Borowiec’s wry photos and his forthcoming book on the project, The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream, offer just one possible explanation for why a generation soured on the suburbs.

Above photo: Chuckery Lane, Bath, Ohio, 2006. This mini-mansion is on land that used to be the country estate where the founding family of the Firestone Tire and Rubber bred race horses and went fox hunting.